OVP: Waltz with Bashir (2008)

Film: Waltz with Bashir (2008)
Stars: Ari Folman
Director: Ari Folman
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Film-Israel)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Waltz with Bashir is a hard film for me to review.  There's so much going on, and quite frankly it took me a while to acclimate into the actual rhythms of the film: is it a documentary or a narrative?  Is it trying to tell an historical perspective, or is it perhaps trying to convince us of its history?  So many questions come to mind as you're watching Waltz with Bashir, which is already so handicapped by that "I am learning as I'm watching handicap" issue that affects stories about foreign wars alien to my American background that I literally had to watch the opening fifteen minutes three times before I felt confident enough to proceed to the rest of the movie.  As a result of this, I felt that I could admire the technical skill of this movie and occasionally found it strangely provocative (the way that we rediscover our own history), but I ended up feeling a bit cold to it.  It's not a documentary or a film that I will ever love, I think, in the same way that others just became enamored with it, but I can appreciate the artistry on display.

(Real life I thought it was a particularly bold choice to animate the film, which recounts one man trying to recall the 1982 Lebanon War with a series of friends and acquaintances.  This feels, only seven years out from the film's release date, really iconic and sort of landmark, like the sort of film that is frequently borrowed from by other movie-makers as they play around with a totally different cinematic oeuvre.  The movie's color palette, steeped in blues and oranges, brings light in a very literal sense to the audience-we get a better sense of the world at night, where light sort of shoots out from the dark in a burst of illuminating glory.

The main character's amnesia seems many times to be a far too convenient plot point.  I didn't quite get it at first, and to think that a man would so block out a memory that he couldn't even remember years at a time of his life seems pretty contrived without some sort of medical explanation, particularly since it's hard to fathom that the man existed in the years since without thinking about the war.  It's not always the greatest idea to question the plot of a movie during a review, but it's a pretty serious hole and makes the film not work on an actual story-wise nature.  The film is a documentary, of course, but there's too little heed paid to the principle character in this regard not to hinder the film's overall performance.

As a result of this, the film works more in clips than in an actual whole film.  There's no single scene of the movie that isn't excellent on its own (particularly the scenes on the beach and the scene with the dog-shootings), but the movie itself is so frequently just feeling and mood.  It works in that regard, but I'm someone that wants plot, and I feel like the plot doesn't work in this movie.  If it were a straight documentary I'd buy that, but even a straight documentary should have a more cohesive narrative, and I just found that film strayed too far from reality in critical moments (like the amnesia) to be great on its own.  It almost would have been better as a silent film, quite frankly, and probably could have gotten the point across at the same level.  So I'll say like, but not love, and go from there.

Those are my thoughts on this film-what are yours?  It's a short movie and one that doesn't lend itself well to a review in my opinion so this is a short one, but I'm sure most of you have seen it and have thoughts, so share in the comments!  And also weigh in on the 2008 Foreign Film Oscar race, as we'll be getting there pretty quickly now (two more movies left to review).